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The years between the Russian Revolution and the Spanish Civil War were full of hope. There was a feeling that momentous change was afoot, sweeping through Russia and Spain and reverberating globally. At the same time it became a period of disillusionment for many when the promise of the moment was not fulfilled. Throughout the period artists and writers picked up the rallying cry in large numbers. A significant number of these artists even joined the fighting in Spain. George Orwell was among them. His Homage to Catalonia (1938) captured both the promise and the frustration of the movement. While in Spain, Orwell fought alongside the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista; POUM) and was wounded in the neck. He came away from the Spanish Civil War with an intense dislike of the Communist party, which had been armed with help from the Soviet Union and had made alliances with more right-wing socialist and liberal fighters to destroy the largely anarchist POUM. Orwell held that this fissure ultimately handed the fascists power and destroyed what had been the seeming triumph of workers over their oppressors. In addition to Homage to Catalonia, Orwell published several books dealing with the betrayal of the Communist revolution in Russia, notably the allegory Animal Farm (1946).

Like Orwell, the Hungarian-born British writer Arthur Koestler is best known for a novel that he wrote about his experiences in Spain as well as his disillusionment with Communism. Koestler went to Spain in order to report on the war and was captured and imprisoned by the fascists. His break with the Communist party came later, when he was forced to confess to crimes he did not commit during the show trials of the Stalin era in the Soviet Union. Koestler wrote powerfully of those experiences in Darkness at Noon (1940).

Unlike Orwell and Koestler, the Mexican revolutionary painter Diego Rivera was deeply imbued with the fervor of the Communist party. He was a member of the Mexican Communist party and on several occasions visited the Soviet Union. His work, consisting mostly of murals, is strongly evocative of the power of workers to control their own destiny. While his work is an interesting combination of Mexican folk art and Byzantine symbolism, he was strongly antireligious and deeply loyal to the Communist movement. In a famous controversy, his Man at the Crossroads mural was torn down from Rockefeller Center in New York because it contained an image closely resembling the Russian revolutionary leader Lenin. Rivera reconstructed the mural in Mexico City and continued to fight for his revolutionary ideals. Some of his most famous political murals include Man, Controller of the Universe, The Agitator, and several portraits of Lenin.

While not as overtly political as Orwell or Rivera, Pablo Picasso of Spain made a profound statement against war with his painting Guernica. Picasso painted his masterpiece of weeping anguish shortly after Francisco Franco had orchestrated the German bombing of the city of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso had been asked to paint a work for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair in 1937. With the revolution lost, and Spain allied with the Axis powers, Picasso’s painting was a cry of protest against the brutality of the bombing and war in general.

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Other writers who bore witness to the events of the era include the French writer André Malraux, in L’Espoir (1937, translated as Man’s Hope); José Maria Gironella of Spain, whose novel Los cipreses creen en Dios (1953, translated as The Cypresses Believe in God) recounts the effects of the war on a Spanish family; and Ernest Hemingway in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).

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